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- Mankind in the Making - 4/49 -

the privilege and responsibility of knowledge. We may plead lack of
will or lack of moral impetus, but we can no longer plead ignorance.
Just as far as our light upon the general purpose goes, just so far
goes our responsibility (whether we respect it or not) to shape and
subdue our wills to the Making of Mankind.

Directly the man, who has found akin to himself and who has accepted
and assimilated this new view, turns to the affairs of the political
world, to the general professions of our great social and business
undertakings, and to the broad conventions of human conduct, he will
find, I think, a very wide discrepancy from the implications of this
view. He will find--the New Republican finds--that the declared aims
and principles of the larger amount of our social and political effort
are astonishingly limited and unsatisfactory, astonishingly irrelevant
to the broad reality of Life. He will find great masses of men embarked
collectively upon enterprises that will seem to his eyes to have no
definable relation to this real business of the world, or only the most
accidental relationship, he will find others in partial lop-sided co-
operation or unintelligently half helpful and half obstructive, and he
will find still other movements and developments which set quite in the
opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound
growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through
the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and
even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and
death and extinction.

But not deliberately towards Death. It is only in the theoretical
aspirations of Schopenhauer that he will find an expression of
conscious and resolved opposition to the pervading will and purpose in
things. In the common affairs of the world he will find neither
deliberate opposition nor deliberate co-operation, chance opposition
indeed and chance co-operation, but for the most part only a complete
unconsciousness, a blind irrelevance or a purely accidental accordance
to the essential aspect of Life.

Take, for example, the great enthusiasm that set all England waving
bunting in June, 1902. It was made clear to the most unwilling observer
that the great mass of English people consider themselves aggregated
together in one nation mainly to support, honour, and obey a King, and
that they rejoice in this conception of their national purpose. Great
sums of money were spent to emphasize this purpose, public work of all
sorts was dislocated, and the channels of public discussion clogged and
choked. A discussion of the education of the next generation, a matter
of supreme interest from the New Republican point of view, passed from
public sight amidst the happy tumults and splendours of the time. The
land was filled with poetry in the Monarch's praise, bad beyond any
suspicion of insincerity. All that was certainly great in the land, all
that has any hold upon the motives and confidence of the English,
gathered itself into a respectful proximity, assumed attitudes of
reverent subordination to the Monarch. All that was eminent in science
and literature and art, the galaxy of the episcopate, the crowning
intellectualities of the army, came to these rites, clad in robes and
raiment that no sane person would ever voluntarily assume in public
except under circumstances of extreme necessity. The whole business was
conducted with a zest and gravity that absolutely forbids the theory
that it was a mere formality, a curious survival of mediŠvalism
cherished by a country that makes no breaks with its past. The spirit
and idea of the whole thing was intensely real and contemporary; one
could believe only that those who took part in it regarded it as a
matter of primary importance, as one of the cardinal things for which
they existed. The alternative is to imagine that they believe nothing
to be of primary importance in this world; a quite incredible levity of
soul to ascribe to all those great and distinguished people.

But it reflects not at all upon the high intelligence, the unobtrusive
but sterling moral qualities, the tact, dignity, and personal charm of
the central figure in their pageantries, a charm the pathetic
circumstances of his unseasonable illness very greatly enhanced, if the
New Republican fails to consider these ceremonials of primary
importance, if he declines to see them as of any necessary importance
at all, until it has been conclusively shown that they do minister to
the bettering of births and of the lives intervening between birth and
birth. On the surface they do not do that. Unless they can be shown to
do that they are dissipations of energy, they are irrelevant and wrong,
from the New Republican point of view. The New Republican can take no
part in these things, or only a very grudging and qualified part, on
his way to real service. He may or he may not, after deliberate
examination, leave these things on one side, unchallenged but ignored.

It may be urged that all the subserviences that distinguish our kingdom
and that become so amazingly conspicuous about a coronation, the
kissing of hands, the shambling upon knees, the crawling of body and
mind, the systematic encouragement of that undignified noisiness that
nowadays distinguishes the popular rejoicings of our imperial people,
are simply a proof of the earnest preoccupation of our judges, bishops,
and leaders and great officers of all sorts with remoter and nobler
aims. The kingdom happens to exist, and it would be complex and
troublesome to get rid of it. They stand these things, they get done
with these things, and so are able to get to their work. The
paraphernalia of a Court, the sham scale of honours, the submissions,
the ceremonial subjection, are, it is argued, entirely irrelevant to
the purpose and honour of our race, but then so would rebellion against
these things be also irrelevant and secondary. To submit or to rebel is
a diversion of our energies from the real purpose in things, and of the
two it is infinitely less bother to submit. In private conversation, I
find, this is the line nine out of ten of the King's servants will
take. They will tell you the public understands; the thing is a mere
excuse for festivity and colour; their loyalty is of a piece with their
Fifth of November anti-popery. They will tell you the peers understand,
the bishops understand, the coronating archbishop has his tongue in his
cheek. They all understand--men of the world together. The King
understands, a most admirable gentleman, who submits to these
traditional things, but who admits his preference is for the simple,
pure delight of the incognito, for being "plain Mr. Jones."

It may be so. Though the psychologist will tell you that a man who
behaves consistently as though he believed in a thing, will end in
believing it. Assuredly whatever these others do, the New Republican
must understand. In his inmost soul there must be no loyalty or
submission to any king or colour, save only if it conduces to the
service of the future of the race. In the New Republic all kings are
provisional, if, indeed--and this I shall discuss in a later paper--
they can be regarded as serviceable at all.

And just as kingship is a secondary and debatable thing to the New
Republican, to every man, that is, whom the spirit of the new knowledge
has taken for its work, so also are the loyalties of nationality, and
all our local and party adhesions.

Much that passes for patriotism is no more than a generalized jealousy
rather gorgeously clad. Amidst the collapse of the old Individualistic
Humanitarianism, the Rights of Man, Human Equality, and the rest of
those broad generalizations that served to keep together so many men of
good intention in the age that has come to its end, there has been much
hasty running to obvious shelters, and many men have been forced to
take refuge under this echoing patriotism--for want of a better
gathering place. It is like an incident during an earthquake, when men
who have abandoned a cleft fortress will shelter in a drinking bothy.
But the very upheavals that have shattered the old fastnesses of
altruistic men, will be found presently to be taking the shape of a new
gathering place--and of this the New Republic presents an early guess
and anticipation. I do not see how men, save in the most unexpected
emergency, can be content to accept such an artificial convention as
modern patriotism for one moment. On the one hand there are the
patriots of nationality who would have us believe that the miscellany
of European squatters in the Transvaal are one nation and those in Cape
Colony another, and on the other the patriots of Empire who would have
me, for example, hail as my fellow-subjects and collaborators in man-
making a host of Tamil-speaking, Tamil-thinking Dravadians, while
separating me from every English-speaking, English-thinking person who
lives south of the Great Lakes. So long as men are content to work in
the grooves set for them by dead men, to derive all their significances
from the past, to accept whatever is as right and to drive along before
the compulsions of these acquiescences, they may do so. But directly
they take to themselves the New Republican idea, directly they realize
that life is something more than passing the time, that it is
constructive with its direction in the future, then these things slip
from them as Christian's burthen fell from him at the very outset of
his journey. Until grave cause has been shown to the contrary, there is
every reason why all men who speak the same language, think the same
literature, and are akin in blood and spirit, and who have arrived at
the great constructive conception that so many minds nowadays are
reaching, should entirely disregard these old separations. If the old
traditions do no harm there is no reason to touch them, any more than
there is to abolish the boundary between this ancient and invincible
kingdom of Kent in which I write and that extremely inferior country,
England, which was conquered by the Normans and brought under the
feudal system. But so soon as these old traditions obstruct sound
action, so soon as it is necessary to be rid of them, we must be
prepared to sacrifice our archaeological emotions ruthlessly and
entirely.

And these repudiations extend also to the political parties that
struggle to realize themselves within the forms of our established
state. There is not in Great Britain, and I understand there is not in
America, any party, any section, any group, any single politician even,
based upon the manifest trend and purpose of life as it appears in the
modern view. The necessities of continuity in public activity and of a
glaring consistency in public profession, have so far prevented any
such fundamental reconstruction as the new generation requires. One
hears of Liberty, of Compromise, of Imperial Destinies and Imperial
Unity, one hears of undying loyalty to the Memory of Mr. Gladstone and
the inalienable right of Ireland to a separate national existence. One
hears, too, of the sacred principle of Free Trade, of Empires and
Zollvereins, and the Rights of the Parent to blockade the education of
his children, but one hears nothing of the greater end. At the best all
the objects of our political activity can be but means to that end,
their only claim to our recognition can be their adequacy to that end,
and none of these vociferated "cries," these party labels, these
programme items, are ever propounded to us in that way. I cannot see
how, in England at any rate, a serious and perfectly honest man,
holding as true that ampler view of life I have suggested, can attach
himself loyally to any existing party or faction. At the utmost he may
find their faction-fighting may be turned for a time towards his
remoter ends. These parties derive from that past when the new view of
life had yet to establish itself, they carry faded and obliterated
banners that the glare and dust of conflict, the vote-storms of great
campaigns, have robbed long since of any colour of reality they once
possessed. They express no creative purpose now, whatever they did in
their inception, they point towards no constructive ideals. Essentially
they are things for the museum or the bonfire, whatever momentary
expediency may hold back the New Republican from an unqualified
advocacy of such a destination. The old party fabrics are no more than
dead rotting things, upon which a great tangle of personal jealousies,
old grudges, thorny nicknames, prickly memories, family curses, Judas
betrayals and sacred pledges, a horrible rubbish thicket, maintains a
saprophytic vitality.

It is quite possible I misjudge the thing altogether. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, for example, may hide the profoundest and most